Macbook questions

[MakeMeJumpIntoTheAir]

I'm on an approx 3 year old macbook - looking at activity monitor I had three quarters of the hard disk space free - so why am I getting so many page outs and swaps being used. Currently only have 4 tabs open in safari and there is only about 16MB of space free. The swap used figure is 854.8MB.

I have no idea what I'm talking about btw - should I just take the laptop to genius bar and get them to check it?

I'm on Safari version 5.1.10 and have Mac OS X 10.6.8 .24 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and is 2 GB.

Any simply worded advice would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Swapping is to do with memory, not hard disk, so having lots of hard drive free will not necessarily reduce the use of swap space. There is an app called cocktail that you can use to run various clean up scripts and repair disk permissions that might be worth running before going to a genius bar.

Thank you trash - will I have to buy the app?

In the free version, it runs 10 times. To unlock it's only $19usd, so not too expensive. App is at www.maintain.se/cocktail